question Not Advancing Format

[LunarMist]

Are there any modern 2TB drives that do not have the advancing format? From what I read the 3TB drives are not compatible with my 64-bit OS.

 

[Stereodude]

Just the Hitachi's.

 

[LunarMist]

Like this one?

 

[Stereodude]

Yes, that's what's been reported.

 

[LunarMist]

What is the story with the 3TB Hibachis, do they use the advancing format?

 

[MaxBurn]

I thought that once you went to 3TB they had to be advanced format?
I had to struggle to find another 2TB seagate non AF to match the 4 that I already had.

 

[Stereodude]

I thought that once you went to 3TB they had to be advanced format?

I don't think so...

 

[Chewy509]

I thought that once you went to 3TB they had to be advanced format?

No, no reason, other than botched Operating System design and drivers, which won't address more than 2^32 sectors.

ATA-6/SATA both use 48bit sector addressing (aka LBA48) allowing up to 2^48 addressable sectors. With 512byte sectors that's 2^57 bytes (or 128 Petabytes) addressable. With 4K sectors it raises that limit to 2^60 bytes (or 1024 Petabytes) addressable, which is very nice for scientific and high performance computing... Mind you, SCSI and SAS now use 64bit sector addressing allowing up to 8388608 Petabyte arrays.

I can understand the change since most OS filesystems now use 4K cluster sizes by default, so making 1 sector = 1 cluster is nice to have... (Some filesystems still use 1K clusters by default, but that can easily be changed during the 'newfs' or 'mkfs' process via a command switch).

but back to the original question, no it doesn't.

 

[Chewy509]

What is the story with the 3TB Hibachis, do they use the advancing format?

From a quick look on their website and at the datasheets, most don't.

See: http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000

These ones don't...

 

[blakerwry]

No, no reason, other than botched Operating System design and drivers, which won't address more than 2^32 sectors.

ATA-6/SATA both use 48bit sector addressing (aka LBA48) allowing up to 2^48 addressable sectors. With 512byte sectors that's 2^57 bytes (or 128 Petabytes) addressable. With 4K sectors it raises that limit to 2^60 bytes (or 1024 Petabytes) addressable, which is very nice for scientific and high performance computing... Mind you, SCSI and SAS now use 64bit sector addressing allowing up to 8388608 Petabyte arrays.

I can understand the change since most OS filesystems now use 4K cluster sizes by default, so making 1 sector = 1 cluster is nice to have... (Some filesystems still use 1K clusters by default, but that can easily be changed during the 'newfs' or 'mkfs' process via a command switch).

but back to the original question, no it doesn't.

The push for 4k sectors was to minimize ECC and addressing overhead used on the disk media itself. The new format can result in 11% more usable capacity using the same platters. Supposedly, the ECC algorithms can now better detect/correct errors, which is important as disk errors increase due to increasing the number of bits read/written.

4k was likely convenient due to the fact that memory and file systems already manage lots of data in 4k chunks. It may or may not result in faster processing.

The end result is a one-time bump in capacity so <insert vendor here> can announce bigger drives before <insert other vendor here>.

 

[MaxBurn]

Ah, the more efficient use of space thing is what I incorrectly remembered as a requirement for 3TB disks. Certainly helps anyway.